Average Height in the Philippines (Men & Women)

The average height in the Philippines

Filipino men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 163.2 cm (5′4″), and Filipino women 149.6 cm (4′11″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Its 2016 study pooled 1,472 population-based studies, with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people, to estimate adult height for every birth year from 1896 to 1996 in 200 countries.

The Philippines is near the bottom of that table for both sexes. Filipino men rank 192nd of 200. Filipino women rank 199th, ahead of only Guatemala. NCD-RisC names the Philippines, together with Bangladesh and Nepal, as the countries after Guatemala where women born in 1996 average less than 151 cm.

The site's 163 cm page is the average Filipino man to the centimeter, and the 4′11″ page is within a few millimeters of the average Filipino woman.

What a birth-cohort figure means

NCD-RisC estimates mean height at age 18 for each birth cohort, everyone born in one year. The latest cohort in the study was born in 1996. Using cohorts rather than an average of everyone alive keeps different generations apart, and that is essential for understanding the Philippines, where men's and women's heights have moved in very different ways.

NCD-RisC used only surveys in which height was measured, from representative samples of the general population. Studies limited to special groups were excluded. A Bayesian statistical model combined the data and borrowed information from neighboring countries where Philippine data was sparse.

A century in which only men grew

This table holds one of the most unusual patterns in the global height data. Filipino men gained 8.5 cm over the century, a solid if unspectacular increase. Filipino women gained only 1.7 cm. Women's height peaked at 150.7 cm in the 1956 cohort, then slipped to 149.3 cm in 1976 and 149.6 cm in 1996. Women born in 1996 are a full centimeter shorter than women born forty years earlier.

The sex gap doubled

The result is a dramatic widening of the gap between men and women. In the 1896 cohort, Filipino men were just 6.8 cm taller than Filipino women, one of the narrowest gaps in the world. By the 1996 cohort the gap was 13.6 cm, wider than in about 85% of countries. In 1896 it was the third narrowest of the 200 countries in the dataset. Our World in Data highlights exactly this, noting that the male–female height gap in the Philippines roughly doubled from 7 cm to 14 cm over the past century. It contrasts the Philippines with South Korea, where the gap shrank from 18 cm to 13 cm as women gained height faster than men.

Neither NCD-RisC nor Our World in Data identifies a single cause for the Philippine pattern. Height reflects nutrition and health in childhood, so a divergence like this suggests that whatever improved conditions for boys over the century did not improve them equally for girls. Untangling the reasons would need detailed national data on how boys and girls were fed and cared for. The international sources used here do not provide that.

The Philippines in 1896

A century ago, the Philippines was in a region of very short populations. NCD-RisC found that people born in 1896 were shortest in Asia and in Central and Andean Latin America. Laotian men of that cohort averaged just 152.9 cm, the same as a well-nourished 12.5-year-old boy today, and were followed by men in Timor-Leste and Guatemala. Filipino men born in 1896, at 154.7 cm, were only a little taller.

Filipino women, by contrast, were not exceptionally short then. At 147.9 cm, they were taller than Japanese women (142.3 cm), Bangladeshi women (141.5 cm) and Mexican women (143.5 cm) of the same cohort. Over the next century, those countries' women gained 9–16 cm, while Filipino women gained less than 2 cm. That is how the Philippines fell to second-to-last place for women.

How the rankings shifted

Ranking every country in the NCD-RisC data for each cohort shows the same story in a different way:

Filipino men have always been near the bottom of the world table, and have climbed slightly in the most recent cohorts. Filipino women dropped from 165th to 199th between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts and have stayed there. Women elsewhere kept gaining height while Filipino women did not.

Why women's height matters

The stagnation of women's height is more than a statistical curiosity. With Filipino women born in 1996 averaging under 150 cm, the second-lowest figure in the world, it bears directly on the risks the NCD-RisC authors highlight: short maternal stature is linked to babies born small for gestational age, to preterm birth and to complications in pregnancy. In the authors' view, whether women's height improves can shape future trends in infant and maternal mortality, so the question of why Filipino girls' growth lagged is also a question about the next generation.

Child stunting: progress, then a long plateau

Our World in Data, summarizing the research, explains that stunting, being too short for one's age, mostly happens in the first two years of life, and that nutrition and childhood illness are the main causes. WHO and UNICEF survey estimates compiled by Our World in Data show how the Philippines has fared:

Stunting fell by about 11 percentage points between 1987 and 2003, then barely moved for the next 15 years, hovering between 30% and 33% before reaching 26.7% in 2021. Compare Indonesia, where stunting fell from 48.1% in 1996 to 21.6% in 2022, or Bangladesh, where it fell from 70.9% in 1986 to 23.6% in 2022. The slow progress since the early 2000s is consistent with the NCD-RisC finding that adult height in the Philippines has hardly changed for recent cohorts, especially among women.

Height rules in Philippine law

Height standards have also been addressed directly in Philippine legislation. In May 2021 the country enacted Republic Act No. 11549, the "PNP, BFP, BJMP and BuCor Height Equity Act," which lowered the minimum height for applicants to four uniformed services: the Philippine National Police, the Bureau of Fire Protection, the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, and the Bureau of Corrections.

The law also grants an automatic height waiver to applicants from indigenous cultural communities for the PNP, BFP and BJMP, and allows a waiver for the Bureau of Corrections. It works by amending earlier statutes for each service: Republic Act No. 6975 for the police, Republic Act No. 9263 for the fire and jail bureaus, and Republic Act No. 10575 for corrections.

Set against NCD-RisC's averages, the numbers are telling. The new minimum for men, 157 cm, is about 6 cm below the average Filipino man. The minimum for women, 152 cm, is still above the 149.6 cm average for Filipino women born in 1996. Even after the reduction, the average Filipino woman would fall short of the requirement unless she qualified for a waiver.

Body size in nutrition planning

Average body size also shapes how the government sets nutrition targets. The Food and Nutrition Research Institute of the Department of Science and Technology publishes the Philippine Dietary Reference Intakes, which state recommended energy and nutrient intakes by age and sex. Its 2015 tables, revised in 2018, use a reference body weight of 60.5 kg for adult men and 52.5 kg for adult women from age 19 onward. On that basis they set daily energy intakes such as 2,530 kcal for men and 1,930 kcal for women aged 19–29. Reference values like these are built for the Filipino population, so they reflect local body sizes rather than those of other countries.

The Philippines among its neighbors

Filipino men are about as tall as men in Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam. Filipino women are shorter than women in every neighboring country in the table, including Laos and East Timor, whose men are 3 cm shorter than Filipino men. The women's gap with Indonesia is 3.2 cm and with Malaysia almost 7 cm. Only Guatemala, on the other side of the world, has shorter women. The Guatemala page covers the one country below the Philippines, and the average height by country hub has all 200.

What these averages mean day to day

For Filipinos, the useful benchmarks are about 163 cm (5′4″) for men and 150 cm (4′11″) for women born in the 1990s. A woman of 157 cm (5′2″) is clearly tall by national standards, and a man of 170 cm is well above average. To compare a specific height with reference data, try the height percentile calculator.

The Philippine story raises a question that national surveys will need to answer: why girls did not share in the height gains boys made over the 20th century. With child stunting finally falling again in the most recent estimates, the next generation of Filipino women may begin to close that gap.